Clark Campaign Going Open Source

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark is looking for a few good programmers, designers and technical writers.

Clark's technology team announced Monday the launch of Clark TechCorps, an initiative to build a suite of free, open-source applications for campaigns and elections.

The project will organize volunteers to write software for the Clark campaign and release their work under open-source licenses.

Among the projects slated for development are a Friendster-style social-networking application and a tool for campaign field workers to track mailings, donations and door-to-door visits.

The Clark technology staff also expects to release the code for several of its internal applications, including a set of tools for managing campaign data and the software used to run Clark's community website.

Developers initially will distribute software under the BSD license, which would allow other campaigns to use the code freely. They likely will allow distribution under other open-source licenses once campaign lawyers grant approval.

Clark's effort is similar to an initiative by rival Howard Dean's campaign, which has operated an open-source software community called DeanSpace since late May.

"We both have the same exact problem: We need to mobilize our grass-roots base. There are vendors who have tools that help, but the complete toolkit doesn't exist. The pieces are out there, but there's no solution," said Zack Rosen, a Dean technology developer involved with DeanSpace.

Like the Dean campaign, Clark supporters adopted open source for both idealistic and practical reasons.

"Open source for us symbolizes organizational transparency. We really feel that it's important that all development we do has this methodology behind it," said Clark TechCorps project manager Josh Hendler.

Open source also offers concrete advantages in a campaign environment, where people are both chronically short on time and reluctant to spend money on anything but advertising and fund raising, Clark technology director Josh Lerner said.

"It's not that easy to ramp up a technology infrastructure in a short time frame. Open source is really good at that. It's free; the bugs get fixed; it runs on cheap hardware," he said.

Organizational pressures have been especially intense for the Clark campaign, which sprang into existence in September after an online draft movement convinced Clark, a retired general and former NATO supreme commander, to run.

Lerner believes open-source development is the best way to manage increasing numbers of technology volunteers.

"You can't grow a team from 15 to 100 very easily. The only way to do it is through this distributed model. You couldn't do it in a traditional business/employer model," he said.

That realization is increasingly typical of the new generation of political campaigns, said "chromatic," technical editor of the O'Reilly Network and co-author of Running Weblogs with Slash.

"Rather than a campaign saying, 'We need 1,000 warm bodies to stuff envelopes,' they're saying, 'We have information pain here,'" he said. "They're looking to their supporters and saying, 'Some of you have special talents, can you deal with this?'"

Lerner acknowledged that like any open-source community, Clark TechCorps will need time to organize itself.

"If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development," he said.

A few months, however, is an eternity in campaign time. The New Hampshire primary is a little more than a month away. And some of the projects TechCorps has set for itself -- like building a comprehensive campaign data-management tool -- would be ambitious even for a large, established software company.

But Lerner is optimistic about attracting developers.

"We plan to be in this until November, in which case the site will have had over 10 months to hit critical mass. There's no reason TechCorps can't grow to hundreds if not thousands of active developers in that time frame," he said.

He added that over the long term, the aim of the project is to provide software that anyone can pick up and improve.

"Frankly, if Republicans want to use it, I think that's great, too," he said. "You can't be an open-source person and say, 'Well, I love open source and believe in it, but the military or the Republicans can't use my software.' It's human nature to think of it that way, but you can't."